Qualcomm lawyers in Broadcom case erred

Judge: No sanctions; mistakes not willful

A federal judge has dropped proposed sanctions against six lawyers involved in Qualcomm’s messy patent dispute with rival Broadcom, ruling that they did not withhold critical documents on purpose.

U.S. Magistrate Barbara Major last week found that errors had occurred in the case but that outside lawyers who represented San Diego-based Qualcomm did not act in bad faith.

“The fundamental problem in this case was an incredible breakdown in communication,” Major wrote in a 12-page opinion dissolving the sanctions against the lawyers.

That’s far different from the language Major used in January 2008, when she cited “exceptional misconduct” in a 48-page ruling that rebuked Qualcomm for intentionally withholding reams of critical e-mails and other decisive documents to gain a strategic advantage over Broadcom in a patent dispute involving video compression technology.

Federal rules authorize judges in civil lawsuits to impose sanctions on parties and their attorneys who fail to comply with document requests and court orders. The rules require litigants to respond to requests for documents in good faith.

Qualcomm settled the case with Broadcom and was ordered to pay $8.5 million in legal fees to the Irvine company. In addition, the company and the six outside lawyers involved in the case were sanctioned by Major for withholding the documents.

Qualcomm didn’t appeal. But the lawyers did. They claimed that they had not been able to tell their side of the story previously because of attorney/client privilege.

Last week, Major withdrew the proposed sanctions against the lawyers, finding that the mistakes were not willful.

The Broadcom patent dispute with Qualcomm was long, complicated and bitter, dating back to 2005. Reams of documents were turned over by Qualcomm to Broadcom lawyers. But some critical documents on an engineer’s computer were found late in the process that contradicted Qualcomm’s key argument that it did not participate in efforts to create a standard for certain video compression technology.

Major wrote in her ruling last week that, while there were problems in the process used by Qualcomm’s outside lawyers to identify and collect documents required as part of discovery, those problems were “exacerbated by an incredible lack of candor on the part of Principal Qualcomm employees.”

Evan Chesler, a lawyer with Cravath, Swane and Moore who represents Qualcomm, disputed that. He pointed out that the e-mails and other documents were available but simply undiscovered. He noted that Qualcomm was not pursuing that particular video compression technology at the time, so its engineers had not spent a lot of effort focusing on work to create a standard.

“What really happened here was a profound breakdown in communication in all directions,” Chesler said. “There is no finding that anyone at Qualcomm deliberately deceived the court or any court officers, and in fact, that didn’t happen.”

The proposed court sanctions were dropped against James Batchelder, Christian Mammen, Kevin Leung, Lee Patch, Adam Bier, who were all with the Cupertino law firm of Day Casebeer. which has merged with another firm. Proposed sanctions were also dropped for Stanley Young, who was with Heller Ehrman before it folded. He’s now with another firm.